In the past, a wide area network (WAN) of geographically distributed servers for data centers and Internet sites were more susceptible to reliability, inconsistent performance, and scalability issues than a network of local servers. Also, balancing the load demand between geographically distributed servers for web-based applications and content such as email and streamed multimedia data has proven to be difficult for several reasons.
One reason is that when a geographically distributed server fails, there has not been a facility for automatically redirecting client requests to another server that could also fulfill the client's request.
Another reason is that adding and/or removing servers from a geographically distributed network has proven to be difficult. Also, methods for balancing the load between geographically distributed servers have not employed intelligent algorithms for automatically connecting a client to the server that can optimally fulfill the request.